I get all the stuff about efficiency (although I have to point out that this is backward: "An ideal internal combustion engine intakes at absolute zero and exhausts at plasmid temperatures"; the hot reservoir is where you take from, and the cold is where you dump to [work being the difference in the intake heat and output heat]), as I have a degree in ME also. I'm not arguing against electric cars; I'm wondering about what challenges they'll face and how the world can cope with them. The fact that to date, we haven't seen a mass market EV shows us that the challenges are real, even if surmountable with time.
Points for fact-checking my thermo. But. The Tesla Model S is a mass-market EV. The MiEV is a mass-market EV. The Nissan Leaf is a mass-market EV. There's a long list of mass-market EVs that are absolutely, 100% ready for prime-time and they're selling. They aren't selling in Detroit, that doesn't surprise me at all; everywhere that isn't 100% committed to an obsolete technology is all over it, though. I built with Advanced DC 9" motors and Optima yellow-tops back when I was in college. Shit might as well have been Kitty Hawk. Motor efficiency hasn't really changed in 50 years but the controllers we had back then were fuckin' through-hole circuitry. We were saying things like "some day soon there will be 1 farad capacitors." Aerodynamics doesn't change, electric motor efficiency doesn't much change, but the thing between the cord and the motor is virtually unrecognizable. We piled twelve hundred pounds of Sonnenschein NiMH batteries into Viking 23 and it cost $50k. The same equivalent energy from Honda is under a thousand dollars. We're there, dude.
I guess we're disagreeing on the definition of "mass market", which is ok. To stick to hard numbers, Tesla sells something like 10,000 cars per quarter (at an operating loss, even at $80k or whatever they are), and the Leaf sells about 4,000 (in the US; I don't know about their global). The Corolla, by comparison (which I consider to be the gold standard of fuel efficient cars), sells more than 80,000 per quarter, while the Cruze sells about 60,000. Sure they're selling, but they're niche at this point.
C'mon, man, you're better than this. Google tells me that there were 16 million cars sold last year. Inside EVs tells me that 160,000 of them were electric. That's one percent. Not a lot no matter how you look at it. But these are durable goods we're talking about. The IRS depreciates cars over a 5 or 6 year period and for our purposes, EVs weren't even available until 2011. Compare and contrast: the first DVD player was introduced in 1996 and didn't match VHS sales until 2002... and DVDs cost $20, not $20k. There were under 20k electric car sales in 2011; in 2014 there were 320k. That's a 100% increase, year over year, every year. Tesla wasn't even a manufacturer five years ago and now you're arguing that because they aren't outselling the Corolla they never will. If you can walk down to the dealership and see one on the showroom floor, it's mass-market. The difference with electric cars is there's likely to be a waiting list.
It ain't like we're talking lead acid, yo. all it takes is economics.